The Role of Parenting Styles on Violence among Students in Secondary Schools in Embu County, Kenya

Youth violence, both in and out of school, is a worldwide problem. Students' violence is manifested in form of bullying among students, physical fights, gender violence, and violence against school property during school strikes. Violence in secondary schools wastes a lot of learning time as students and teachers spend a lot of time dealing with disciplinary issues related to violence, at times it has also led to loss of life and school property in school fires during school strikes. The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of parenting styles towards students' violence in schools, in Embu county. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The study was anchored on Bioecological theory and parenting styles theory. Questionnaires were used to collect data from students on parenting styles and students' violence, focus group discussion schedule was used to collect in-depth views of students while interview schedule were used to collect views of guidance and counseling teachers. Purposive sampling was used to select a sample of 15 schools which had reported more cases of violent behavior out of the 132 secondary schools in the county. Stratified random sampling and systematic random sampling were used to select 399 participants. Purposive sampling was used to select 15 Guidance and counseling teachers from the 15 schools. For the purpose of this study parenting styles were limited to authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive indulgence and permissive neglectful while students' violence was limited to physical fight amongst students and destruction of property in the school. The study found that parents have a big role to play in influencing their children's violent behavior through poor role modeling, inadequate advice and lack of listening to their concerns. The paper discusses contribution of parenting styles on violence among secondary school students in view of these findings.